Testing the Cloud: SOASTA CEO Tom Lounibos (Part 3)

Sramana: Who were your first customers at SOASTA?

Tom Lounibos: It took us some time to build our technology. They were small companies and large companies. The larger ones were Hallmark and TurboTax. In 2007, TurboTax had an amazing [crash]. They filed 25 million tax returns, and their site went down in 2007 when a whole bunch of late filers hit their site. That caused 300,000 Americans to miss their tax filing [deadline], and the IRS actually extended the tax deadline for TurboTax customers.

Hallmark got hit hard during Valentine’s Day. They process 8 million cards on Valentine’s Day. Most of our customers were companies that had event-driven campaigns. It was not always intuitive [who] these companies were. One of our early calls was from Denny’s. I had to laugh and ask the guy if Denny’s even had a website! He told me they were doing a commercial on Super Bowl Sunday and that they were going to offer a free Grand Slam breakfast to anybody who went to the website and signed up for one. I asked him how many people they were planning on coming to the site, and he thought it would be a couple hundred thousand. When the event occurred, 59 million people went to the site during a 4-hour period.

We focus on delivering performance to web and mobile applications. We do it in a way where companies like Denny’s spend $25 million on an ad campaign only to see the site go down after 50,000 people hit the site. Companies like TurboTax don’t want to have the IRS extend filing deadlines because their site went down.

Our tests are very easy to do. We can spin up anywhere from ten to thousands of servers within minutes. Within hours we know where the breakpoints in the infrastructure and application will be. We built this company for business owners to see performance from the user’s perspective. Mobile computing is exploding, and businesses don’t want their sites to crash.

The analytics and actionable intelligence portion our product is what really keeps people coming back. We can tell people that if they reduce the Flash video on their site from 12 seconds to 9 seconds, they could get another 10,000 consumers online at the same time. We can tell people when their load balancers are not configured properly and recommend configurations to them. Yes, our customers use cloud testing to conduct really big tests, but a lot of our customers use it for the analytics now as well.

Sramana: What happened in 2006 when you identified the problem area? How did you actually go about and build the company?

Tom Lounibos: We identified a few early adopters and worked with them as we built the product. We did some early tests for them, sometimes for just a few hours at a time. Those few hours turned into hundreds of hours of testing. We charged them for testing by the hour, gauged by how many virtual users they need.

This segment is part 3 in the series : Testing the Cloud: SOASTA CEO Tom Lounibos
1 2 3 4 5 6 7